Anthony, you write, “But I do think there are good-faith originalist arguments that the EPC commands colorblindness, and I don’t take it that your excerpt is meant to be a full-scale rebuttal of any of those originalist arguments, including McConnell’s.” I certainly had no intention of rebutting McConnell’s argument that the EPC commands colorblindness, because I don’t believe that McConnell made such an argument to rebut. McConnell was making an originalist argument for the result of Brown v. Board, which is a different (though related) thing.

Since various attempts at plain-meaning interpretations of the equal-protection clause have been made here, let me quote Gerard Bradley on the subject some years ago, offering a plausible one of his own:

It will help to read the text in its fairly straightforward sense. . . . “All persons,” that is, every single human being, are to enjoy the protection of the state’s law. What this means may be breathtakingly simple. Laws against rape, for instance, are for the protection of blacks as well as whites. More pointedly, laws against murder are for the protection of blacks as well as whites, which means no lynching by citizen mobs. No one at all is to be permitted by selective or lax enforcement to remain outside of the legal community in a virtual state of nature. This intention is supplemented by the due process clause which effectively prohibits the converse: no extra legal enforcement action to the detriment (of life, liberty, property) of any person. Neither of these has to do (except derivatively) with state laws to be reviewed by federal courts. The ad hoc, extra legal quality of the prohibited acts suggests an extremely limited remedy (e.g., habeas corpus, mandamus, prohibition) role for federal courts.

Bradley notes that if this reading is correct–if it is the plain meaning, historically recovered, of the text–then modern jurisprudence has put the most stress on the clause’s least significant word.